Firefox 3.1 Beta 3?

As we await for the release of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 (schedule for sometime this month), comes talk that there may be a Beta 3 release. According to this article from Linux World:

Previous schedules published by Mozilla had limited Firefox 3.1 to only two betas before moving to a release candidate.

In a long post to the “mozilla.dev.planning” forum, Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, said that Beta 3 is necessary to get a feel for the severity of the remaining bugs and an idea of how long it will take developers to eradicate them. In addition, another beta will give more exposure to features landing in the browser only as of Beta 2, which has not yet been released.

Not sure what kind of a delay this is going to put for the final release of Firefox 3.1. Even without a beta 3, Mozilla is not going to hit the original goal of January 2009. Last I heard they were still trying to get Firefox 3.1 released within the first quarter 2009.

But wait, wasn’t Firefox 3.1 only suppose to be a simple “enhancement” to Firefox 3? That is, implementing those features that were almost, but not quite ready when Firefox 3 was released. See What’s Next For Firefox? for more information. Now nearly six months since the release of Firefox 3, 3.1 is being plagued by the same set backs (extended Beta releases, show stopper bugs, etc.) as a major release.

I suppose some good can come out of this delay as it has recently been reported Half of Firefox Extensions Not Compatible with 3.1. This would give developers a little more time to make the needed changes to get their add-ons working with Firefox 3.1.

Among other things it touts “100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test”

While the Acid tests certainly are great things, they are no deal-breakers for my web-browsing choices.

On the other-hand, I wonder if the latest march of browser-version upgrade madness across developers is creating too high an expectation in me. To be fair, IE8 is still simmering in beta development, but I feel like I am missing something if I am not trying the (near) latest beta/alpha versions of Opera/Chrome/Firefox. And I get a little frustrated by not having by latest beta-fix fast enough! ;)

Will I ever find a point where I am content with a final browser version “as-is” and could care less when the next “version” is released?

After reading “Half of Firefox Extensions Not Compatible with 3.1” I think I’ll wait and see what happens with Extensions before installing it. I already lost my favorite Theme when 3.0 came out. There are too many Extensions that I really need and don’t want to risk losing.

3.1 sure is taking longer than expected, but on the other hand, it brings many things that weren’t expected/planned either (brings more new CSS3 stuff than 3.0 did, private browsing that was supposed to come later, TraceMonkey…).

ah sorta like that goofy tab tearing feature which I really don’t like. It is too sensitive and I don’t know how many times I have accidentally tore a tab trying to switch between tabs. I also don’t care for CTRL-TAB, I have a problem where it gets stuck and won’t flip thru anymore.

@Claus – What is this ‘Final version of a browser’ thing you speak of? ;)